The most outspoken man in the House gets some real power.

Of the four hundred and thirty-five members of the House of Representatives, Barney Frank is the only one whose public remarks have been collected in a book of quotations (“Frank Talk: The Wit and Wisdom of Barney Frank,” published in 2006). He is also the only congressman whose fight against the impeachment of President Bill Clinton has been the subject of a documentary, which was shown to acclaim at film festivals around the country (“Let’s Get Frank,” directed by Bart Everly). Frank is not the only member of Congress to have been the subject of a full-scale biography, but the account of his life, written by a former aide named Stuart E. Weisberg, to be published by the University of Massachusetts Press later this year, will likely rank among the more exhaustive and admiring books ever printed about a sitting member of the House, who is described as “arguably the most unique and fascinating, certainly the most entertaining political figure in Washington.”

The title of the book suggests the basis for the widespread interest: “Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman.” Now sixty-eight years old, Frank has represented Massachusetts’s Fourth Congressional District since 1981, and he remains best known for his decision, in 1987, to reveal that he is gay, becoming the first member of Congress to do so voluntarily. At the time, the disclosure provoked more curiosity than controversy, but, two years later, Stephen Gobie, a prostitute whom Frank had patronized and then befriended, made a series of lurid allegations about him—claiming that they had had sex in the House gym and that Frank had permitted Gobie to run a prostitution ring out of his home. An investigation by the House Ethics Committee failed to substantiate those charges, though it determined that Frank had written a misleading letter of recommendation for Gobie and had Gobie’s parking tickets waived. Nevertheless, Frank was reëlected with ease, and he became a pointed critic of the Republicans who took control of the House in 1994 and a passionate opponent of Clinton’s impeachment, in 1998. A witty and effective presence on the House floor and in committee rooms, Frank in recent years has settled into the roles of wise guy and wise man of the Democratic Party. (Conservatives “believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth,” he once remarked. More recently, he noted that Barack Obama’s continued insistence that we have one President at a time “overstates the number of Presidents we have.”) In a 2006 poll of Capitol Hill staffers by Washingtonian, published shortly before the elections that gave Democrats control of the House for the first time in twelve years, Frank was voted the brainiest, funniest, and most eloquent congressman—a notable achievement, since he often speaks in a barely comprehensible mumble.

During the financial crisis this fall, Frank’s status as a gay trailblazer suddenly seemed remote and irrelevant. After the Democrats’ victory, he became chairman of the Committee on Financial Services, and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, designated him the Democrats’ chief negotiator with the Bush Administration on legislation to address the crises in the banking and auto industries. “Through this all, the quarterback for us is Barney,” Pelosi told me. “He’s solution-oriented, respectful of different perspectives, and brilliant. And it’s brilliance that saves time, because he simplifies the complex for us. He is an enormously valuable intellectual resource for the Congress.”

For the first time in more than forty years of public life, Frank has real power, and he is wielding it in a characteristically idiosyncratic manner. He remains a national symbol of outré sexuality as well as a rare wit in generally humor-deficient Washington. But in Congress he is thought of no longer simply as a liberal of the old school (which he is) but also as a grind. His expertise is in one of the least glamorous subjects on the national agenda—housing, particularly rental housing for poor people—and he is using that knowledge to confront the nation’s economic crisis. “For Barney, the question has always been: What works? What can government do to see that people have the decent necessities of life?” his sister Ann Lewis, the longtime Democratic activist, says. “Now he’s right there. Barney’s been preparing for this moment for his entire life.”

The contours of Frank’s Massachusetts district have shifted over the years, but his political base has long been the liberal, heavily Jewish suburbs of Newton and Brookline. (Brookline was once part of the district represented by Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House, but he surrendered it to Frank’s predecessor, Father Robert Drinan, saying, according to Frank, “I can’t take all the phone calls. Those nice Jewish ladies even call when they agree with you!”) Much of the campus of Boston College, a Jesuit institution, also lies within Frank’s district, and two days after the recent election he paid a visit to the B.C. Real Estate Council, an alumni group.

Boston College has become a major national university in recent years, but the hundred or so older graduates at the luncheon reflected the school’s Irish-Catholic roots. Frank ambled to the podium in his standard uniform: a monochromatic suit, a white shirt, and a rep tie. The look is an improvement on the dishevelled attire that was once his trademark. When Frank was running for state representative in Boston, in the early nineteen-seventies, a campaign poster featured his photograph and the words “Neatness Isn’t Everything.” In conversation, and even in his speeches, Frank often refers to his lifelong struggle to lose weight, but he is well into his seventh decade, and that battle seems to have been lost, a plight accentuated by his apparent tendency to buy shirts in his aspirational, rather than his actual, size.

Frank never speaks from a prepared text, and he talks so quickly that transcription is nearly impossible. His staff in Washington sometimes posts videos of his remarks on the Web instead. Frank has lived in Massachusetts since he was a freshman at Harvard, in the late nineteen-fifties, but his accent is still marked by a virulent strain of his native New Jersey—he is from Bayonne. (Early in Frank’s congressional career, Toby Moffett, a representative from Connecticut, jokingly asked for U.N.-style simultaneous translations of Frank’s remarks during committee hearings.)

Frank rarely smiles, even when he’s being funny. “There are three lies politicians tell,” he told the real-estate group. “The first is ‘We ran against each other but are still good friends.’ That’s never true. The second is ‘I like campaigning.’ Anyone who tells you they like campaigning is either a liar or a sociopath. Then, there’s ‘I hate to say I told you so.’ ” He went on, “Everybody likes to say ‘I told you so.’ I have found personally that it is one of the few pleasures that improves with age. I can say ‘I told you so’ without taking a pill before, during, or after I do it.” A priest and several older men at my table realized that Frank was talking about sex, and, embarrassed, they stared at their hands. But the moment passed quickly. In Frank’s district, at least, his homosexuality provokes little controversy, even at a Catholic school. (Elsewhere, Frank no longer censors his ribald sense of humor. Not long ago, Paul Begala, the political strategist, was speaking at a fund-raiser for a gay-rights group and said, “When I told my father, back in Texas, that I was speaking to an L.G.B.T. group, he said that sounded like a sandwich.” From the audience, Frank called out, “Sometimes it is!”)

Frank told the group at Boston College that he predicted, and might have prevented, the real-estate crisis that has engulfed the economy. By this time, many aspects of the crisis were well known. The end of the housing bubble had caused home values to plummet and mortgage defaults to rise, particularly among subprime borrowers. Many financial-services firms had assembled mortgages and bought and sold them as securities, and the value of those assets had also declined sharply—a development that devastated the firms. The investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had closed their doors, and the financial-services industry was on the brink of collapse, even after Congress authorized an emergency seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout, in October.

According to Frank, at the root of the real-estate crisis was a misguided notion that homeownership should be available to all people—what President Bush has called “the ownership society.” “The ‘I told you so’ here is that homeownership is a nice thing but it is not suitable for everybody,” Frank said at Boston College. “There are people in this society who don’t have enough money to be homeowners, and there are people whose lives are not sufficiently integrated for them to take on the responsibility to be a homeowner. And we did too much pushing of people into inappropriate mortgages and into homeownership.” He said that many people would always be renters, and that there was nothing wrong with this. “We need to get back in the business of building rental housing and preserving the housing we have,” he said.

In one respect, Frank went on, the current crisis has had a salutary effect: home prices have fallen, making homes more affordable for those who still have the money to buy them. “But we need to be bringing down the cost of housing in an orderly way, like by building new housing to increase the supply,” he said. “We’ve brought the cost down a little bit in a less orderly way. I tend to eat when I’m under stress. I want to lose twenty-five pounds—but not by Sunday. And that’s how home prices have come down.” (Frank speaks incessantly about food. In “Let’s Get Frank,” he complains about the low-fat provisions given to Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee during the impeachment debate. Referring to Dick Gephardt, who was the Minority Leader at the time, Frank says, “They got all this jelly-doughnut shit in there, and I gotta eat this stuff. . . . Gephardt’s a sheygets—whaddaya expect from Gephardt?” Sheygets is Yiddish for a male Gentile, and thus one who cannot be trusted to provide acceptable snacks.)

Frank arrived in Congress when the Reagan Administration was withdrawing the federal government from the business of building housing for the poor. At the time, it was clear that the private sector had little incentive to build low-income housing without government assistance in the form of tax breaks or subsidies. The Reagan Administration assisted low-income renters by offering them vouchers to help them pay rent and by providing tax credits to local developers who built low-income housing. In subsequent years, Frank has fought with intermittent success to preserve such programs from major budget cuts.

In 2001, Frank embraced a new approach. That year, Bernie Sanders, then a representative from Vermont, sponsored a bill to create a government trust fund that would be used for building and renovating low-income housing. Sanders’s legislation didn’t pass, but the idea was later reintroduced, and Frank backed a proposal for funding the trust with a portion of the annual revenue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation, the two giant, government-backed mortgage companies. The funding for the trust would be automatic—not subject to annual congressional approval. “I realized, because housing has been a backwater, getting appropriations for housing is going to be tough,” Frank told me. “First of all, if you want to build housing, it can’t be year by year. You know, it’s construction. But, two, I’m finding money outside the appropriations process, money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So I can do a lot of units without directly competing for the appropriations.”

The idea was based on a variety of similar programs at the state and local levels. In the past few decades, governments across the country have set up nearly six hundred trust funds to build low-income housing, typically by collecting small taxes or fees from real-estate transactions. “There was positive buzz for what was happening with state and local trust funds, but the amounts were really a drop in the bucket,” Barbara Sard, the director of housing policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said. “But the dream for making a real difference in low-income rental housing has been to do it at the federal level, and that’s what Barney has been trying to do.”

In 2007, Frank used his influence as committee chairman to insure that the housing trust-fund bill finally passed the House. In 2008, a similar measure made it through the Senate as part of a larger bill, which President Bush signed. By that time, however, Fannie and Freddie were mired in debt, and the value of their shares was collapsing. And, because Frank’s committee was supposed to oversee the two mortgage giants, he faced questions about what he might have done to avoid the catastrophe.

The Committee on Financial Services, which has seventy members, is one of the biggest panels in Congress. (It was known as the Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs Committee until the Democrats lost control of the House in 1994, and Frank attributes the change to “Republican political correctness.”) Congressional hearings customarily begin with statements from members, a practice that can take hours. Frank and Michael Oxley, the Ohio Republican who was his predecessor as chairman, shared a distaste for the tradition, and together they were known as the “impatient caucus.” Still, Frank allows his colleagues to speak briefly before a hearing, and, on October 21st, Scott Garrett, a conservative Republican from New Jersey, used his time to attack Frank—in particular, his claim that he had anticipated the crisis.

“Before we are able to go forward with new and important changes to the over-all regulatory structure for our financial-services industry, I do believe that it is essential that we better understand just how we got into this problem,” Garrett said. “Now, one of the main parts of the problem was poor regulation in the past, specifically in the area of Fannie and Freddie.” According to Garrett, “our distinguished chairman” had no right “to claim the mantle of being a champion of reform with Fannie and Freddie.” On the contrary, Garrett argued, he and other Republicans had wanted to “raise the capital levels, to reduce the retained portfolios, to lower the conforming loan limits.”

Garrett’s accusations were genteel compared with those made by Bill O’Reilly, a few weeks earlier, when Frank appeared on his show on Fox News. “You blame everybody else! You’re a coward!” O’Reilly bellowed. “In any private concern, you’re out on your butt! But not here in the federal government!” Frank, in turn, berated O’Reilly for his “ranting” and “stupidity.” (The confrontation has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.)

At the hearing, Frank responded testily to Garrett. “The purpose of this hearing was to be forward-looking,” he began. “And I had hoped we could focus on that. But, after the gentleman from New Jersey’s comments in having decried partisanship, he then practiced it. It does seem to me to be important to set the record clearly before us.” Frank pointed out that when Garrett had attempted to tighten regulations on Fannie and Freddie, Republicans had controlled the House. “Had a Republican majority been in favor of passing that bill, they would have done it,” Frank said. “Now he has claimed that it was we Democrats—myself—who blocked things. The number of occasions on which either Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay consulted me about the specifics of legislation are far fewer than the gentleman from New Jersey seems to think.

“I will acknowledge that during the twelve years of Republican rule I was unable to stop them from impeaching Bill Clinton,” Frank went on. “I was unable to stop them from interfering in Terri Schiavo’s husband’s affairs. I was unable to stop their irresponsible tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and a Patriot Act that did not include civil liberties.” In other words, Frank insisted, if the Republicans had wanted to try to prevent the mortgage crisis, they would have had plenty of opportunities to do so.

Frank and I discussed his role in the housing crisis at his district headquarters, in a small office building in Newton. His boyfriend, Jim Ready, who runs an awning company in Maine, had just returned from Whole Foods with Frank’s lunch, a salad, which he was eating with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. Frank explained that he first became interested in housing during his service, in the late sixties, as the top aide to Kevin White, who was then the mayor of Boston. The city had a long history of building public housing, mostly high-rises, and White pledged to encourage the construction of small apartment complexes, in keeping with the scale of most Boston neighborhoods.

“At first, when you talk about affordable housing and subsidized housing, people immediately ask, ‘What sort of public housing?’ ” Frank said. “ ‘Is it run by the city, like Cabrini-Green?’ ”—a notorious, now demolished project in Chicago. “And we long ago learned how not to do that, but that still was in people’s heads. And if you can do a word-association test, where a picture floated out in people’s heads, there would be these sterile high-rises. And it struck me, before I conceptualized this, that the answer to that was public-private partnership, that that’s the way to do affordable housing. And then it struck me: You know what? This is the model for other things. Public-private-sector coöperation.”

When White was mayor, one of the most infamous public-housing projects in the city was Columbia Point, in Dorchester. The project was said to be so dangerous that ambulances refused to enter it without a police escort. In a process begun under White, and shepherded in its early days by Frank, Columbia Point was turned over to a private developer, who converted it to a mixed-income community, which included housing for the poor and market-rent apartments for the more affluent. “Barney is a real capitalist,” Joe Corcoran, the developer who took over Columbia Point, told me. “He understands that we have to make a profit. Barney is the smartest politician I’ve ever seen. I have no problem with him being gay, or being Jewish. I like Jews. I like doing business with Jews. They know how to make a deal.”

Frank’s experience in city hall in Boston led to an impatience with abstractions. He recalled a comment by Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, who will be the director of the National Economic Council in the Obama Administration: “Larry said, ‘Oh, well, in the history of the world, nobody ever washed a rented car.’ Well, people wash leased cars all the time. And, secondly, poor people don’t rent cars. It’s just one of those irrelevant things.” Frank went on, “In 2004, it was Bush who started to push Fannie and Freddie into subprime mortgages, because they were boasting about how they were expanding homeownership for low-income people. And I said at the time, ‘Hey—(a) this is going to jeopardize their profitability, but (b) it’s going to put people in homes they can’t afford, and they’re gonna lose them.’ ” (In a recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Lawrence B. Lindsey, a former economic adviser to President Bush, wrote that Frank “is the only politician I know who has argued that we needed tighter rules that intentionally produce fewer homeowners and more renters.”) Frank recalled with disdain a Bush Administration proposal to allow time limits on rental vouchers for poor people. “They said, ‘Well, don’t you agree that we should limit the amount of time people have a voucher?’ I said, ‘Yes, if you limit the amount of time they can be poor—“I’m sorry, you can only be poor for four years.” ’ ”

In 2005, while the Democrats were still in the minority, Frank contributed to a bipartisan effort to put his objectives—tighter regulation of Fannie and Freddie and new funds for rental housing—into law. At the time, Fannie and Freddie were regulated by a small agency within the Department of Housing and Urban Development; the bill proposed to create an independent agency to monitor their operations. Frank and Michael Oxley, who was then chairman of the Financial Services Committee, achieved broad bipartisan support for the bill in the committee, and it passed the House. But the Senate never voted on the measure, in part because President Bush was likely to veto it. “If it had passed, that would have been one of the ways we could have reined in the bowling ball going downhill called housing,” Oxley told me. “Barney, to some extent, is misunderstood—with this image of him as a fierce partisan. He is an institutionalist. He believes in the House and in the process. He eschews the grandstanding style that so many members use and prefers to work behind the scenes and get something done.”

Frank’s prescience on the housing crisis should not be overstated, because Fannie and Freddie represented only one aspect of the problem. “Fannie and Freddie were contributors to the bubble, but they came late in the really bad loans, after the private issuers like Merrill and Citigroup,” Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, said. “The law probably would have curtailed their lending, but it’s hard to say it would have made any difference. The real problem was outside of Fannie and Freddie, with the banks, and nobody in Congress was talking about it.”

Frank hopes that the housing trust fund won’t have to rely entirely on Fannie and Freddie for money. He intends to secure additional funding from, among other sources, the Federal Housing Administration, a division of the Department of Housing and Urban Development which insures mortgages. Specifically, he wants to fund the trust with profits from an F.H.A. program that allows older homeowners to borrow money against the equity in their homes. “We’re going to expand that program, which makes money for the federal government, and start with part of the profits from it,” Frank told me. “If you know how the government works, you can find ways to do what you want.”

The number of housing units that will be built or renovated with funds from the trust is likely to be modest at first. (Frank declined to provide an estimate.) But the money will be available to both nonprofit and commercial developers, fulfilling Frank’s longtime goal of promoting public-private partnerships. “Barney has been our champion in the House, and he has been unbelievably effective,” Sheila Crowley, the president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which lobbied for the establishment of the trust, said. “If the bill hadn’t come out of Barney’s committee to the House with universal Democratic support and strong support from moderate Republicans, the Senate wouldn’t have paid any attention. But Barney got it done.”

The bill takes effect this year, but it’s unclear whether the housing trust will work as Frank expects. “I am skeptical that a national housing trust will address the real problems in our housing markets,” Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economics professor who studies the housing market, said. “In many places, there is a lot of housing available at low prices. In Buffalo and throughout the industrial Midwest, there’s loads of low-cost rental housing available. The private sector in Houston does a great job of providing low-cost rental housing without help from the government. The question is whether this program will make a difference in places like New York and San Francisco, where there is a shortage. It’s not obvious that you want to think about new or renovated housing for poor Americans. Poor people buy used cars. There’s no reason to think that used housing isn’t often the right answer as well.” Moreover, it’s not clear that Frank’s determination to avoid the annual congressional appropriations process makes good public policy. “Once you have funding on automatic pilot, the money is spent regardless of what other priorities are there for the federal government and whether it’s properly targeted and properly administered,” David John, who studies housing as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said. “This is why we have an appropriations process.” Scott Garrett, Frank’s colleague and ideological adversary on the Financial Services Committee, told me, “Barney has a great deal of faith in government’s ability to solve people’s problems. The question is whether that faith is justified.”

When the Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, the Democratic leadership in the House made Frank a kind of one-man immediate-response team to Newt Gingrich, the new House Speaker. Frank and Gingrich sparred almost daily, and Frank still professes surprise that Gingrich took their disagreements personally. “Barney Frank hates me,” Gingrich said at the time. (He would not discuss the matter for this article.) According to Frank, Gingrich is a “bleeder”—a derogatory term for a boxer who is prone to cuts. For Frank, the word has particular resonance: one of his high-school classmates was Chuck Wepner, a heavyweight boxer who was known as the Bayonne Bleeder.

“My first day of high school, I was sent to the vice-principal for discipline, because I got in trouble for talking too much,” Frank told me. “When I got to her office, Chuck was already there. He’d gotten into a fight with the toughest kid in the school.” (In 1975, Wepner went fifteen rounds in a heavyweight championship bout against Muhammad Ali and, in so doing, it has been said, inspired Sylvester Stallone to create the character Rocky.)

Frank’s parents, Sam and Elsie, raised their four children in a distinctly less rarefied setting than the ones in which they all eventually arrived. Sam Frank operated Tooley’s Truck Terminal, near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel in Jersey City. “My father ran a truck stop,” Frank told me. “He sort of lived on the fringes. We’re talking about Hudson County—Frank Hague was the boss—a totally corrupt place. In 1946, my father’s brother Harry got the contract to sell cars to the city, and of course he had to give a kickback to the guys who ran the city. My father was a middleman or something.” Sam was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury about the matter. He refused and was found in criminal contempt. “For a while, he was hiding out from the cops in New York,” Frank recalled. “I was six years old, and once I went to see him in the city, and we saw ‘Robin Hood,’ with Errol Flynn. The next day, the cops came to my first-grade class to interview me, to see if I had been with my dad. My father’s sister, Aunt Minnie, taught at the school. She heard about the cops coming and went straight to my classroom to break it up, so I didn’t have to talk.”

Eventually, Sam returned to New Jersey, and was jailed for refusing to testify. “They treated him nice,” Frank said. “They let my mother bring him food. He served for about a year.” The incident notwithstanding, Frank’s parents instilled in their children a belief in the power of the government to do good. “We had this great good fortune of growing up with parents who took politics seriously,” Frank’s sister Ann Lewis told me. “The idea that people could choose their leaders was not a small thing in the aftermath of World War II.” Lewis, who is two years older than Frank, said that Frank was outspoken even as a boy. “Our uncle Rosie was a sportswriter, and Barney was a huge Yankees fan, and one day around 1950, when Barney was around ten, Rosie brought home a talent scout for the Yankees,” she said. “And I remember Barney asking the guy why the Yankees didn’t have any black ballplayers. I was very struck by that. I looked at the kid, and I thought, That’s a really tough thing to do. Good for you.”

“Barney was a famous person at sixteen,” Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor, who dated a classmate of Frank’s at Bayonne High School, said. “He talked exactly like he talks now, and he was always talking, always involved in every kind of politics. Because Bayonne was such a sleazy place, nobody knew whether Barney was going to wind up in Congress or in jail.” According to Frank, his father was involved with the Mafia. “Funzi Tieri, a big-time gangster with the Genovese family, came to my brother David’s bar mitzvah, when I was twenty-three,” he said. Sam Frank died at the age of fifty-three, while Barney was an undergraduate at Harvard, and Barney took a year off to help resolve the family’s tangled financial affairs. “The Mafia guys were very helpful to me at the time,” he said.

All four Frank children settled far from Bayonne. Ann Lewis, the eldest, was the director of communications in the Clinton White House and a top aide to Hillary Clinton during her Presidential campaign. David Frank works as a speechwriter for the A.A.R.P., and Doris Breay is an administrator at Brandeis University who frequently campaigns for her brother. In the nineteen-seventies, Elsie Frank moved to Boston and later became the president of the Massachusetts Association of Older Americans. During Barney’s first reëlection campaign, in 1982—a tough race, because redistricting forced him to run against another incumbent, Margaret Heckler—Elsie was featured in a series of television commercials for her son. She died in 2005.

Earlier this fall, the Democrats in the House had to take sides when Henry Waxman, of California, challenged John Dingell, of Michigan, for the chairmanship of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which Dingell had held for a year. (Dingell also chaired the committee from 1981 to 1995.) The contest represented a classic ideological confrontation between the left and the center of the Democratic Party. As chairman of the House oversight committee, Waxman, an outspoken, pro-environment liberal, led high-profile investigations of Republican wrongdoings, while Dingell, a pro-labor moderate, is known as a behind-the-scenes player, often on behalf of the automobile industry.

Frank voted for Dingell, who lost, 137–122. “I thought Henry was making a great mistake,” Frank told me in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building. “One of the advantages we have today is that we appear to be much less ideologically driven than the Republicans. I think there is a danger of what will look like liberal overreach. We need all the moderates to pass legislation, even at two hundred and fifty-seven”—the number of Democrats in the House after the 2008 election. “If Dingell and Waxman were running ab initio, I’d vote for Waxman. But I do think there should be some burden of proof before you throw out a chairman.”

To the public, Frank looks much like Waxman—a blunt partisan with a flair for sound bites—but, like Dingell, he has a record as a pragmatic legislator. He graduated from Harvard in 1962 and began a long, ultimately unsuccessful quest there for a Ph.D. in government. (I once asked him the subject of his planned dissertation. “The Massachusetts legislature,” he told me. What about the legislature? “I never got much farther than that,” he said. He later attended Harvard Law School, and graduated in 1977.) In the mid-sixties, as a teaching assistant at Harvard, Frank lived on campus and had time for non-academic pursuits. He spent five weeks registering black voters in Mississippi, and travelled around the country as an organizer for the activist Allard Lowenstein, an early leader of what would become the student movement of the late sixties. Frank also befriended a group of young, reform-oriented politicians, who hoped to wrest control of the commonwealth from the long-serving Democratic Party stalwarts who dominated state government. In time, his circle of politician friends coalesced into an entity known as the Democratic Study Group, for which Frank served as an unpaid executive director, and which quickly came to center on a young state representative from Brookline named Michael Dukakis.

“At the time, Massachusetts was one of the three or four most corrupt states in the country,” Dukakis told me. “About twenty or thirty of us young reform types decided to start a little organization that would give us some clout, on basic progressive legislation and conflict-of-interest and integrity stuff. We persuaded Barney to take the Red Line down from Harvard to be our staff guy—for free. He hasn’t changed. He was smart as hell and funny as hell and worked like hell.”

In 1967, Frank was invited to work on Kevin White’s first campaign for mayor of Boston. White, who was thirty-eight, belonged to a generation of charismatic young politicians—including John V. Lindsay, in New York—who ran on platforms dedicated to empowering neighborhoods and cooling inner-city tensions, and he narrowly defeated Louise Day Hicks, a former chairperson of the Boston School Committee, who opposed the desegregation of local public schools. “The White administration was an incredible burst of energy, and Barney was effectively Kevin’s chief of staff,” Fred Salvucci, who ran White’s “little city hall,” in East Boston, said. “We stopped the expansion of Logan Airport, traded highway funds for mass transit, did all this stuff, and Barney was the guy we went to for answers. Other than saying, ‘Talk faster, I’m busy,’ because his mind was working faster than mine, he was great to work with, even though I couldn’t understand his accent a lot of the time.”

In 1972, Frank ran for state representative in a district that included much of Boston’s Back Bay. He profited from student enthusiasm about the Presidential race that year. “I am one of the few people in the country who can say he benefitted from George McGovern’s coattails,” he has said. Once elected, Frank became known for witty banter and harsh partisanship. After Michael Dukakis won the governorship, in 1974, Frank became one of his most vociferous critics, repeatedly accusing him of betraying his liberal principles.

“I inherited a mess,” Dukakis told me. “The state was a shambles, with twelve and a half per cent unemployment. Time magazine was calling us the New Appalachia. It was depressing stuff. I had to do some hard cutting, and Barney was upset about it, and I can understand why.” Liberal outrage at Dukakis grew so intense that in the 1978 election he drew a primary challenger from the left, Barbara Ackerman, a former mayor of Cambridge, in addition to an opponent from the right, Edward J. King, a pro-business former football player. Frank endorsed Ackerman over Dukakis. “The real point of Ackerman’s campaign,” Barney told his biographer, Stuart Weisberg, “was to show Dukakis that there was a price to be paid for hurting poor people.”

King defeated Dukakis in the Democratic primary and went on to become a conservative governor. “Yeah, I didn’t see Ed King coming on as strongly as he did,” Frank told me. “I was very angry at Mike. And I thought he was doing permanent damage to liberalism.” Frank insists that Ackerman did not cost Dukakis the primary, but he remains troubled by his misjudgment in the race.

Two years later, in 1980, Pope John Paul II instructed priests to withdraw from electoral politics, and Father Robert Drinan, at that time the congressman representing Massachusetts’s Fourth District, complied by not running for reëlection. Frank, with Drinan’s endorsement, easily won the general election. (Afterward, Frank joked about papal infallibility.) In 1982, Dukakis defeated King in a rematch and served two more terms as governor. He said that he had no hard feelings for Frank. “He has always been a strong progressive force around here,” Dukakis said. “He’s a guy who still represents me in Congress and does so very well.”

Frank’s role in crafting the government’s response to the current economic crisis suggests both the promise and the limitations of his pragmatic liberalism. On the evening of Thursday, September 18th, during one of the most tumultuous weeks in American economic history, Frank was summoned to an emergency meeting in the office of Nancy Pelosi. That Monday, the federal government had declined to intercede as Lehman Brothers, the investment-banking firm, declared bankruptcy. But the following day the Federal Reserve provided American International Group, the insurance company, with a bailout worth eighty-five billion dollars, to prevent it from going out of business. Many in Congress viewed these developments with alarm.

“On that Thursday afternoon, I was meeting with my leadership, and I realized I had not heard from Hank Paulson”—the Treasury Secretary—“that day about the markets,” Pelosi told me. “So, because the situation was looking chaotic, I called Hank and said I wanted him to come in the following morning at 9 A.M. with Ben Bernanke”—the chairman of the Federal Reserve—“to brief me and the whole Democratic leadership. I reached him at about 3 P.M., and he said tomorrow morning might be too late. He had to come by that night.”

Pelosi asked Frank and a bipartisan group of senators and representatives to meet with the Administration officials in her office. “That evening, when we met with them, they painted a very dismal picture,” Pelosi continued. “They said if we don’t act now we may not have an economy on Monday night.” Paulson proposed that Congress authorize the Treasury Department to buy large amounts of the so-called toxic assets—mostly mortgage-backed securities—from financial-services companies that were on the brink of collapse. “We kept asking them, ‘Why do you want to buy these assets?’ ” Pelosi said. “ ‘Why not just buy their stock to recapitalize them?’ They just said this was their break-the-glass project—‘In case of emergency, break glass.’ It was waiting in the wings, and they wanted to use it. Harry Reid”—the Senate Majority Leader—“kept asking how much it would cost, and Paulson wouldn’t commit to a number.”

Frank laid out the provisions that the Democrats wanted in a bailout bill: equity for the taxpayers, like any other investors; a program to limit foreclosures for beleaguered homeowners; compensation reform for executives at companies receiving bailout funds; and strict congressional oversight of the whole process. Two days later, on Saturday, September 20th, the Treasury Department sent Congress a formal proposal of sorts. In a text just three pages long, the Treasury asked for seven hundred billion dollars from Congress but provided few details about how the Administration would spend the money. “It was just ridiculous,” Pelosi told me. “They wanted us to surrender all authority and give them seven hundred billion dollars.”

Throughout the weekend, Frank and Chris Dodd, the Democratic senator from Connecticut and the chairman of the Senate banking committee, worked with colleagues in both parties to come up with a plan that they thought could win widespread support. The following Wednesday, September 24th, John McCain, the Republican Presidential nominee, announced that he was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to address the crisis. Although McCain had played no part in the negotiations, the White House promptly scheduled a meeting of the President, the congressional leadership, and the two Presidential candidates for the following afternoon, Thursday, September 25th. By this time, a deal seemed to be in place. Congressional leaders announced that they had agreed in principle to an amended version of the Administration’s bailout proposal. Before the meeting, the Democrats at the White House, including Frank, Pelosi, and Barack Obama, had caucused privately in the Roosevelt Room about their strategy for the day. “Barack said, ‘I think we need to go ahead with this,’ ” Frank recalled. “He was being conciliatory, because he thinks it’s very important for us, both in public policy and politically, that we don’t get blamed for fucking up the economy. And that we not fuck up the economy.”

The meeting with the President nearly destroyed the good will that had been generated during the previous week. John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House, expressed disapproval of the proposal, arguing that it did not reflect a bipartisan consensus. Frank tried to put McCain on the spot: would he back the House Republicans or Bush and the rest of the congressional leadership? As Frank recalled, “I said, ‘John, what do you think?’ ‘Well, I think the House Republicans have a right to their position.’ ‘Fine. You agree with that position?’ ‘No, I just think they have a right to their position.’ He looks like your old uncle, just shrivelled and shrunk, and he just didn’t look good. And we kept pressing him, saying, ‘What is your plan?’ ” McCain wouldn’t say.

“The protocol is you’re not supposed to talk to the President directly,” Frank said. “We just ignored that.” But the President didn’t bring the group together, and the meeting ended without a decision. The Democrats returned to the Roosevelt Room to plot their next move, and Paulson joined them. As Frank recalled, Paulson “literally drops to the one knee” and begged Pelosi to bring the bailout up for a vote in the House, despite the Republican opposition. “But we start yelling at him,” Frank said. “ ‘Jeez, work on your assholes over there—your guys. I mean, you know, we’re trying to do it, and your guys are playing games.’ ”

Two tumultuous votes in the House followed. On September 29th, the bailout was unexpectedly defeated, 228–205, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged seven hundred and seventy-eight points. Congressional leaders and Administration officials made small, mostly cosmetic changes to the bill and, citing the turmoil in the stock market, urged their colleagues to support the measure. On October 3rd, the revised bill passed the House, 263–171. What Frank and the other sponsors of the bailout actually accomplished, however, remains uncertain.

It appears that Frank failed to achieve three of his four initial objectives. The Treasury Department eventually did make direct investments in financial-services firms, but the bill includes few meaningful restrictions on executive compensation, and the oversight provision will likely have only a modest influence on how the bailout money is distributed and spent.

One of Frank’s primary goals for the bailout—providing assistance to homeowners to avoid foreclosures—remains unrealized, even though the Treasury Department has already allocated half of the seven hundred billion dollars. On November 20th, Frank wrote a letter to Paulson, “to urge you in the strongest possible terms to use [bailout] funds to support significant steps that can help stem the tidal wave of foreclosures threatening the stability of our financial system and our economy.” He has held committee hearings to praise banks like J. P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America, which have instituted programs to modify the terms of some mortgages. He has urged support for a proposal by Sheila Bair, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, to enable homeowners to renegotiate mortgages and, potentially, prevent an estimated one and a half million foreclosures this year.

Frank defends the bailout legislation. “Sure, this sucks,” he told me, “but if it wasn’t for what we did, it would suck worse. We were looking at the possibility of a global economic collapse, and that didn’t happen. We are better off than if we hadn’t passed it.” I asked him whether he thought his efforts to force the Administration to modify the bailout, especially on foreclosures, were having any effect. “Jack Newfield, while writing for the Voice under Lindsay, said he didn’t have any governmental power—he had the power to make the dinner parties of the Lindsay-administration officials unpleasant,” Frank replied. “That was his pressure point. That’s part of it. You know, no one, almost no one, is totally indifferent to public opinion. So you have hearings to pressure people. People don’t like to be embarrassed. You have hearings to send messages. So they can have an impact. Sometimes they’re a waste of time. And you can get too diffused. But I think these hearings had some impact.” At the moment, Frank can claim that he played a significant role in creating a tenuous lifeline for banks and other institutions (many of which have yet to resume normal lending), while encouraging the federal government to provide some assistance to terrified homeowners (which may not happen).

In November, Pelosi asked Frank to lead the effort in the House to pass another bailout, for the Big Three American carmakers. On the morning of December 5th, the day that Frank had summoned the chief executives of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler to testify before his committee, the government reported that the unemployment rate had jumped from 6.5 per cent to 6.7 per cent in a single month. Frank used that news to inject a note of drama into his opening statement. “Context is especially important this morning,” he said. “A failure, to some extent, of three of our major domestic manufacturing entities would be a very serious problem in any case. In the midst of the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, it would be an unmitigated disaster.” Opposition from Senate Republicans prevented legislation to rescue the automakers from coming up for a vote. On December 19th, President Bush used his executive authority to offer $13.4 billion in loans from the federal bailout fund to General Motors and Chrysler, which appeared to be enough to enable the companies to survive for a few months—until the new Congress and the Obama Administration devise a long-term recovery plan. “I think what Bush did was right,” Frank told me. “He kept the companies alive until Obama takes over.”

In 1986, Frank approached Tip O’Neill on the House floor to tell him that a forthcoming book would refer to Frank as a gay man. “He said, ‘Oh, Barney, don’t listen to that crap,’ ” Frank recalled. “They say stuff like that about all of us.’ I said, ‘Well, Tip, it’s true.’ And he sort of slumped in his chair and said, ‘Oh, Barney, I’m so sad. I thought you might be the first Jewish Speaker.’ ” (O’Neill, who had little facility for contemporary slang, prepared his staffers by saying that Frank had decided to “come out of the room.”) Two decades later, Frank’s ascendancy in Congress suggests that O’Neill had too little faith in Frank—and in the ability of the country to change.

Frank’s work as a committee chairman absorbs virtually all his time, but he is also, unofficially, the congressman for gay America. “I remember when I first came to Congress, twenty-one years ago,” Nancy Pelosi told me. “And I heard a congressman, William Dannemeyer, on the floor, saying the most hateful things about AIDS and gay people. It was regular fare at the time. I just didn’t get it. And I called Barney to see what we could do about it. And he said, ‘Why are you calling me? Go down there and challenge him!’ ”

Frank remains a sporadic target for anti-gay-rights groups. In the 2006 campaign, John Hostettler, a Republican congressman from Indiana, ran a radio ad that said, “Pelosi will then put in motion her radical plan to advance the homosexual agenda, led by Barney Frank, reprimanded by the House after paying for sex with a man who ran a gay brothel out of Congressman Frank’s home.” (In 1990, the House Ethics Committee rejected the charge that Frank knew about the prostitution ring, which was for straight men.) Asked about his gay agenda, Frank says, “I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people’s rights to get married, join the Army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform.” (Hostettler lost the 2006 race.)

Frank’s mordant view of human nature presents a contrast to the sunnier approach of President-elect Obama, a difference reflected in their dispute over Obama’s choice to have Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor, give the invocation at the Inauguration. “Obama tends to overstate his ability to get people to change their opinions and underestimates the importance of confronting ideological differences,” Frank told me. “It’s one thing to talk to somebody. I talk to more conservatives than anyone, because I’m trying to get legislation passed. But it’s another to make Rick Warren the most honored clergyman in the world.” In California, Warren supported Proposition 8, the successful anti-gay-marriage referendum. “Now, when we fight Warren in California, we are going to hear, ‘Oh, yeah, but Obama picked him for the inaugural.’ He doesn’t deserve that honor. And I don’t want to hear that the other clergyman at the inaugural, Reverend [Joseph] Lowery, supports gay rights. I didn’t vote for a tie in the election.”

Frank worries that Obama’s evenhandedness may prove to be a political liability. “On the financial crisis, Obama said that both sides were asleep at the switch,” Frank said. “But that’s not true. The Republicans were wide awake, and they made choices to oppose regulation. They had bad ideas. He says, ‘I don’t want to fight the fights of the nineties,’ but I don’t see any alternative to refighting the fights of the nineties if we want to change things.”

Still, Frank is uncharacteristically hopeful about the future, including gay rights. “We’re going to do three things in Congress,” he told me. “First, a hate-crimes bill—that shouldn’t be too hard. Next, employment discrimination. We almost got that through before, but now we can win even if we add transgender protections, which we are going to do. And finally, after the troops get home from Iraq, gays in the military. The time has come.”

To Frank, the future looks bright even for the economy. In 2009, he predicts, the federal government will take steps to stop some foreclosures, and produce a stimulus package that will reinvigorate the economy. “It will all work together, and it will work,” he said. “Obama’s almost lucky. He can do all these things on the economy, and both the real and psychological effect of what he’s doing is going to kick in soon after he takes office. And the recovery is going to start about six months before the 2010 elections. That’s pretty good.”

In 2004, when it appeared that John Kerry might win the Presidency, Frank prepared to run for Kerry’s Senate seat. But Frank’s age and the committee chairmanship suggest that he is likely to remain where he is. In October, he began holding hearings on how to transform the laws that govern banks and financial-services companies, with the goal of reforming the system so that the current crisis will not recur. “We are at a moment now when liberalism is poised to have its biggest impact on America since Roosevelt, because the conservative viewpoint has been so thoroughly repudiated by reality,” Frank said. “Someone asked Harold Macmillan what has the most impact on political decisions. He said, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ Events have just totally repudiated them, and we’re now in a position to take advantage of that.” He went on, “You know Hegel. Thesis: No regulation at all. Antithesis: Now the government owns the banks. What I gotta do next year is the synthesis.” ♦

Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002.